NSPCC

NSPCC

Legal references on this page apply to England and Wales.

May 2016: The Government announced plans to scrap Local Serious Case Reviews and amend Local Safeguarding Children Boards in response to Alan Wood's Review. NSPCC briefing on Wood Review and Government response. (As explained in this blog post, the Wood Review mentions home education but the Government response ignores this)

On Friday January 8th I attended a round table discussion with the NSPCC on the subject of keeping children safe in home education. A copy of the invitation can be found here The people who went to the meeting gave an undertaking that they would wait for notes from the NSPCC. The first draft went out on January 29th. An amended version was circulated on February 16th which has now been seen by quite a few people. A compromise has yet to be reached. Read more here (April 2016)

I have collected my social media comments about the NSPCC meeting here (February 2016)

NSPCC Changes Web Page

Towards the end of January the NSPCC revised its web page on home education and serious case reviews. I thought the change was an improvement and blogged about it
here (January 2016)

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Flaws in Serious Case Review Process

"We need a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of why mistakes occur and how the system can learn to avoid them. This requires overhauling the serious case review process..."DfE Policy Paper page 7, Children’s social care reform: a vision for change, January 14th 2016.

I have blogged about some of the problems with serious case reviews and Local Safeguarding Children Boards here

Sent November 23rd 2015 to help@nspcc.org.uk

In March 2014 the NSPCC published a thematic report about home education in
serious case reviews which I gather was intended to summarise risk factors and
facilitate learning for improved practice. I understand from your web page that
this briefing is now under review.

The 2014 briefing simply pulled out recommendations with any mention of home
education in Serious Case Reviews.

Unfortunately, by hyperfocusing only on the recommendations made about home
education within a particular SCR, this gave a very misleading impression of the
SCR as a whole. For example the Caerphilly SCR talked about school not being a
good fit for some children, and the LA just going through the motions, yet the
briefing didn't mention this because it wasn't “about home education.”

Several reviews (eg Child A and and Child case number 14 Birmingham)
indicated problems arising from treating non-attendance at school as the core
issue instead of looking at wider factors. In some situations agencies appear to
have actively avoided dealing with parents perceived as difficult, to the
detriment of the child for example where the GP removed ST (Enfield) from his
list. It's not helpful to make this into a "home education" problem.

In other cases there was a lack of supervision around private fostering or
adoption from abroad, or a culture of low expectations for children from a
particular background, or a focus on adults "struggling" rather than on the
experience of the child. All these involve wider issues than home education.

Case reviews also highlighted situations where people were concerned but
didn't make proper referrals or where concerns raised with children's social
care were not followed up or were not escalated using agreed procedures.
Sometimes this was compounded by agencies mistakenly believing that “education”
would – or could - deal with everything.

However, the recommendations relating specifically to home education focused
on changing local procedures and on urging the council to make representations
to the Government asking for “more powers.”

Regrettably, the SCRs in question were carried out following a process
which has since been dropped in England and Wales. In the past a blame culture
was in operation and by focusing on an individual or an isolated feature of the
case attention could be diverted from local failings. Home education served on
several occasions as a convenient scapegoat.

In the past SCRs would typically come up with SMART recommendations which
enabled local authorities to demonstrate progress by ticking off the
recommendations. In England, practitioners are now able to opt for alternative
methodological approaches for Serious Case Reviews and in Wales SCRs have been
dropped altogether and replaced with Child Practice Reviews. SCRs have been
described as "an activity primarily for senior management" which promoted a
blame culture, hindered inter-agency working and failed to improve practice.

Should the NSPCC wish to provide practitioners with something genuinely
useful then this would require a much less simplistic approach.

Please be aware that I have also posted a copy of this email on my website.